André Polykanine@menelion@caneandable.social
edited

Folks, I need help. A friend of mine handed me a nearly dead HDD with tons of photos and documents. It's a WD My Passport 500 GB, very old, making funny noises but not too much. Windows sees it, diskpart says file system: raw.
What is the best way of attempting to recover the data? We don't care about the HDD itself, just the files on it.
After some investigation I found GNU DdRescue (needs to load into Ubuntu which is a bit daunting, I have no experience working with Linux Desktop and screen readers really); R-Studio and a couple more pieces of software for Windows.
Any ideas, comments, suggestions are hugely appreciated.
UPDATE. From the replies I've gotten so far (thank you so much folks!), I think I was not clear enough: what I count to do is to copy the HDD byte by byte into an img file, then calmly work on that copy. Thanks again!
#HDD #Windows #AskFedi #FediHelp #RecoverData

Amber :neodog_box:@puppygirlhornypost2@transfem.social

Replying to @⁨menelion@caneandable.social⁩

@menelion@caneandable.social There's this old tried and true method of sticking it in the freezer. You do have to be weary of condensation forming on the drive but I've heard countless ancedotal stories about it working even if just temporarily. I'd honestly try that and then use the time you have with the disk to back it up somewhere else.

I'd recommend against using tools like DDRescue unless you can't get anything else to work. If you can get a backup of the drive then you will have a way to try destructive tools out (you should probably back up the back up in that case, i wouldn't particularly recommend using the passport itself for that purpose).